Portland officials have announced a trio of finalists vying to become the permanent city administrator, a position that wields substantial power and influence within the city's new form of government.
Maurice Henderson, a one-time chief of staff to former Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Raymond Lee, the longtime city manager of Greeley, Colorado, and Valerie Washington, an assistant city administrator for Fort Worth, Texas, emerged as the top contenders to succeed Michael Jordan, who city leaders tapped earlier this year to temporarily serve as the top bureaucrat.
The city said more than 100 people nationwide applied for the position, which controls the day-to-day operations of Portland's vast bureaucracy and oversees its $8.6 billion budget and 6,800-person workforce.
The trio of finalists are slated to meet this week with Mayor Keith Wilson, all 12 members of the Portland City Council and a host of city and labor union leaders. Wilson is then expected to make his pick, subject to council approval, a move that will mark one of the most consequential decisions of his first year in office.
"I want a leader who can build a culture of empathy, enthusiasm and innovation within our organization and build trust with our community," Wilson said after the city launched a national search for a city administrator in late August.
The position will pay between $284,000 and $393,000 annually, according to city figures.
Henderson currently serves as a vice president with HNTB Corp., an architecture and engineering firm. In addition to his previous City Hall experience, he has held top jobs with TriMet, the Portland Bureau of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Lee became city manager for Greeley, located an hour north of Denver and home to about 114,000 people, in 2021 but resigned from his post last week "to explore new opportunities," according to local media reports. He also spent years as a deputy city manager and director of public works in Amarillo, Texas.
Washington, meanwhile, has spent more than a decade as an assistant city administrator in Fort Worth, which has a population of more than a million people. She previously held senior bureaucratic roles in Indianapolis.
Voters in 2022 approved a remake of Portland's municipal government that takes power from city commissioners to run departments and bureaus and instead puts it in the city administrator's hands. Those changes and others, including an expanded City Council focused on policy and constituent services, went into effect this year.
In January, the council agreed to keep Jordan, who was the architect of the city's government transition and later interim city administrator, at the helm of the bureaucracy for a year while Wilson found his footing as mayor and began to look for a permanent successor.